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Fiction Desert Trilogy

Desert Trilogy Releases Today!

Desert Trilogy cover smallMy chapbook of three short stories set in the California desert is now available for your ereading devices. It’s officially $2.99, but if you hurry, you might still get it at the $0.99 pre-order price. (It takes a while for Amazon and other retailers to adjust the price.)

Here are brief descriptions, and you can click the linked titles for longer excerpts:

Glass: Derek can’t understand why his hiking partners don’t want him wearing his Google Glass. But alienating friends isn’t the only danger of his obsession with Augmented Reality. (Takes place in a slightly future world in which Google has released an updated version of its ill-fated device.)

Chill Out: Is now the right time for Brad and Amy to have kids? Brad wants to start a family right away, but Amy wants to focus on her writing career. Will a drive in the desert help them settle the argument?

What I Did for Love: Dave is a journeyman carpenter. Now he needs to drill a hole in his girlfriend’s head. Does he have the nerve to finish the job?

Here are all the places you can get the ebook:

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

A print version will be available soon, at a price yet to be determined.

(Cover photo by Steve Berardi, used by permission.)

Categories
Desert Trilogy Fiction

Teaser Tuesday – Excerpt from Desert Trilogy

Photo of sabre-toothed cat diorama
A typical day in Southern California during the Pleistocene. (Photo by La Brea Tar Pits, www.tarpits.org).

Derek gasped, resisting the impulse to roll away from a mammoth lumbering at him, its curving tusks waving dangerously. The thundering of its tree-trunk-sized feet hurt his ears, and he could swear he felt the ground shake—or was that the Glass vibrating to give a sensurround effect? The beast crashed past him and headed off over the mud hills.

Except the barren hills were gone now, replaced with a rolling savanna of bunch grasses dotted here and there with shrubs and larger trees. South of him, the tamarisk-lined wash was now lush with trees: cottonwoods and palms and others he couldn’t identify. Ash and laurel were the others, Glass told him when he zoomed in.

Categories
Fiction Desert Trilogy

New Story Excerpt and eBook News

Desert Trilogy cover smallAbout a year ago, I started talking about self-publishing a small collection of stories set in the desert. I had two stories finished, but that seemed like too few to justify a collection, and so I began working on a third. Then that third story began giving me trouble, because I couldn’t decide on its point of view. It just didn’t seem to be working, so I put the story and the book project aside to work on a novel. I also thought it would be good to get at least one of the stories published somewhere before self-publishing the collection.

Meanwhile, Google cancelled its Glass product, which made me think that third story was dead too, since it was all about a guy who annoys his hiking buddies by wearing his Google Glass all the time. (In fact, I’ve been thinking of subtitling this trilogy, “Three assholes in the desert.” If you get the song reference in that title, then you know the following lyric might be something like, “Which one will the desert kill?” And there are a few near-death experiences in these stories.)

A year later, the stars seem to be aligning on the publication front (more on that to come), and that good news gave me a flash of inspiration to quickly solve the third story’s point of view problem. (Actually, I just listened to the Creative Writing 101 advice I had been telling myself but ignoring all along: avoid head-jumping.) As for the fact that Glass no longer exists, I’d always figured that this was a more advanced version of Glass, so I just called it Glass 2.0, as if Google had rebooted the technology.

So now I’m working toward releasing Desert Trilogy this fall, with the cover featuring a handsome photograph of a Joshua Tree by Steve Berardi (used with permission). I’ve posted a teaser for “Glass” here, and I’ve set up a new page introducing Desert Trilogy here. I hope you’ll check them both out, and as always, leave any feedback in the comments. You can sign up to receive updates on Desert Trilogy by filling out the form below.

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